Williams, J. M. G. (1996). Depression and the specificity of autobiographical memory. In D. C. Rubin (Ed.), Remembering our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (pp. 244-267). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Edwards, S. L., Rapee, R. M., & Franklin, J. (2003). Postevent rumination and recall bias for a social performance event in high and low socially anxious individuals. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 27, 603-617.
2 comments:
In people with depression or with an emotional disturbance, retrieved memories from positive cues are general memories while memories retrieved from negative cues tend to be more specific. However, according to an experiment in the article by J.M.G. Williams, neither the positive nor negative cues had much effect on people who suffered from anxiety. In general, some sources for generic memory can come from repeated events which turn each special event into an autobiographical fact, brain damage, or even events that are only repeated once.
According to Edwards, negative rumination of an event occurred more in people with depression and anxiety, and according to Wenzel, people with panic disorder and social phobia have biased memories and recall only those biased memories more quickly, while people who are not anxious recall all types of memories equally well.
I do not mean to disagree with these articles, but as animals, would it not make sense to remember events more clearly in a negative sense (for self-preservation) than to remember happy events when we do not need to worry about survival? Perhaps it is that in depression, it is as the studies suggest that even happy events cannot be remembered to a normal extent.
The purpose of the experiment conducted in the Edwards article was to examine whether or not rumination for a social event, especially a negative one, and recall bias toward negative information related to the same social event were characteristics of people with high levels of social anxiety. Although some of the results supported the experimenters’ beliefs, since this was one of the first studies to address this topic, some of the results also contradicted the experimenters’ beliefs. What interested me most, in this particular reading, were the results that suggested negative bias in memory recall is caused by an encoding bias, not a retrieval bias. This would make a lot of sense seeing as social anxiety is developed at a young age, thus affecting the way a child develops. Because of this disorder, someone who has this disorder at a young age will learn to encode negative memories, which is why they will only be able to retrieve negative memories, like this study showed.
What interested me most in the J.M.G. Williams article was that he suggested depressed people have generic and overgeneral memories. Despite the fact they’re depressed, I would think they would still be able to recall specific memories, at least specific details of their negative memories. I also found it interesting that Williams suggests overgeneral memories can cause poor problem solving in a depressed person. Although they are able to remember specific scripts in order to figure out how to overcome a problem, Williams uses the example of a “restaurant script”, when they end up in a problem that does not have a specific script, like being lonely on a weekend, their inability to recall their autobiographical memories will cause them to remain depressed because they cannot recall a previous solution to this problem and because there is no script to follow. Williams says their recovery may depend on knowing how to positively respond to events like these. Although this seems a little demanding, seeing as it is not exactly their fault that they are unable to recall specific events, I think it would be beneficial if someone was able to provide memory cues for them during these situations in order to help them remember ways in which they solved a particular problem last time, and get them into the habit of doing this every time.
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